Literacy advocate Malcolm Mitchell tosses a football while warming up to read a children’s book he authored, as Atlanta Public School students gather to watch him at the College Football Hall of Fame on Monday, Sept. 22, 2025 (Ty Tagami/Capitol Beat)
ATLANTA — Communities can now apply for $20,000 grants to promote literacy as the second round of the Georgia Reads program gets underway.
Super Bowl champion turned literacy crusader Malcolm Mitchell commemorated round one by reading to 400 Atlanta fourth graders at the College Football Hall of Fame Monday, in an event livestreamed by Georgia Public Broadcasting.
Mitchell the CEO and founder of the Share the Magic Foundation, read from his children’s book, “The Magician’s Hat,” with help from Dayle Burns, a retired educator and the wife of state House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington.
Mitchell, who struggled to read in college then made it his mission to learn and then promote literacy, said he attends about 75 reading events a year.
“I think in many places we’ve shifted the cultural narrative surrounding literacy, which is a huge piece of that formula,” Mitchell said in an interview before the event, as he was tossing a football around with the kids. “When I was growing up, I didn’t understand the importance of reading.”
He said he tells children that acquiring the ability to read can help them achieve their goals. He established his foundation in 2016, and now he’s encountering older teenagers who tell him they’re headed to college and still have the book — his book — he gave them when they were 8.
“Those moments are surreal,” he said.
Mitchell is partnering with the Georgia Council on Literacy, a state-backed organization established two years ago to address dismal performance on the state reading and writing tests.
The scores on the Milestones English Language Arts tests remain disappointing. They fell last school year in all but two of the seven grade levels tested, according to scores released by the Georgia Department of Education in August.
In fifth grade, 43% scored proficient or better, down 5 percentage points from fifth grade test takers the prior year. Eighth graders also fell 5 points, to 40%.
Georgia lawmakers, many of whom were present at Monday’s celebration, have put millions of dollars behind an effort to screen students for literacy and to retrain teachers in what’s called the “science of reading.” The effort appears to have driven gains in somelow-performing schools.
Scott Johnson, a former lawmaker and state school board member who now leads the literacy council, said he expects to see improved scores with the next round of Milestones tests. He said his group would like to see lawmakers put more money into hearing and vision checks for students.
“We’re hoping to focus on hearing and vision like never before in the coming year,” he said.
The first round of funding for Georgia Reads sent a quarter million dollars to 10 communities.
Dalton is using the money to teach parents about literacy, said Suzanne Harbin, who is collaborating with Believe Greater Dalton, the local organization under the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce that was entrusted with a $25,000 grant.
Augusta is also training parents, said Angela Prince, operations director for RISE Augusta, another 2025 recipient. The partnership between the Richmond County School System and several other organizations is teaching parents in the evenings as they wait for their kids to be released from aftercare programs.
Comer Yates, who has been advocating for the science of reading for years, said Mitchell has been an effective voice for the effort.
“He understands this is a social justice issue and an urgent one,” said Yates, who leads the Atlanta Speech School in Buckhead, which has consulted with the state on its literacy initiative.
The application window is now open for this year’s $20,000 grants. Learn more at the Georgia Reads website.
ATLANTA — Efforts to make Georgia schools safer are exacerbating student absenteeism, a major problem that lawmakers have been studying since this summer.
Many students who are awaiting a tribunal for an alleged disciplinary infraction may be out of school for several weeks before they get a hearing on their guilt or innocence, Darlene Lynch told lawmakers at a hearing Monday
Kids get long-term suspensions or expulsions for minor infractions and wind up in alternative schools that do not offer busing, said Lynch, who is with Georgia Appleseed, a legal advocacy group. If their parents cannot get them to school, she said, they drop out.
“A lot of our cases involve vapes right now — being suspended for three semesters,” said Lynch, who was among about a dozen advocates, experts and officials who spoke at this latest hearing on the problem of chronic absenteeism, a hearing that combined members from study committees in the House and Senate.
Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing at least 10% of a school year, which in Georgia is typically 180 school days.
Lynch told lawmakers that their own efforts to make schools safe are contributing to absenteeism.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly passed House Bill 268, a bipartisan state law to enhance school safety after last year’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School.
It has many elements that were broadly popular in both parties, such as funding for more mental health services.
It also contains a provision that Lynch asked lawmakers to revisit. It requires schools to collect information on students who skip class, misbehave or display other problematic behavior and to quickly transmit those records when a student transfers to a new school.
The law has added layers of bureaucracy that are slowing new student enrollments, Lynch said, leaving kids languishing outside the classroom.
“Schools around the state are demanding a really wide range of records and evaluations before they’ll admit a child to school,” she said, describing an instance when a first grader was denied enrollment until the parent could secure a psychological evaluation and a risk assessment.
“We’re hearing a lot of stories of schools asking for child abuse records and all sorts of legal records and medical records that are potentially protected by other laws,” Lynch said, “and those enrollment delays are causing kids to be out of school for sometimes weeks while they’re dealing with the denial and the dispute.”
Chronic absenteeism has long been a problem, but it grew significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not settled back to lower levels, with one in five deemed chronically absent last school year.
Experts and officials describe it as a crisis that will affect the earning power and even the lifespan of the population of students who drop out as a result.
“They have worse health outcomes: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, lung disease,” Chief Judge Ann B. Harris of Cobb County Superior Court told the lawmakers.
“On average, the life expectancy of someone who has dropped out of high school is eight years less than someone who completed high school. That’s a staggering statistic,” she said, adding that a 2019 study projected that dropouts from the class of 2019 would cost the nation $337 billion.
ATLANTA — Gov. Brian Kemp’s upcoming trip to the Republic of Korea was planned “well before” the federal immigration raid on Georgia’s Hyundai electric vehicle battery plant west of Savannah, his office said, indicating the two are unrelated.
“Governor Kemp and First Lady Marty Kemp will travel to Japan and the Republic of Korea this fall on a mission focused on strengthening economic ties with two key partners,” Kemp’s office said Sunday. “This travel, as with any economic development mission, was scheduled well before the events of Sept. 4, with the logistics required to organize such a mission taking months to finalize.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security executed a search warrant after investigating allegations of unlawful employment practices at the battery plant, detaining 475 workers Sept. 4.
The action provoked complaints from the Republic of Korea, a major economic partner with Georgia.
In a rare bipartisan act to protect children, Georgia legislators adopted a law last year that regulated social media companies.
But the industry sued and, for now, has sidelined the prohibition on advertising to children. The law also required platforms to obtain parental consent when minors signup for service.
The age verification mandate forces everyone to share identifying information to prove their age, placing what a federal judge called “severe burdens” on adults, leading to her decision in June to issue a preliminary injunction against enforcement.
Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has appealed the decision. His office said he is helping to defend similar laws in other states, including Texas, Florida and Ohio.
The platforms are fighting a tide of legislation as states react to congressional inaction. Stories about heedless harm in the pursuit of advertising dollars have galvanized parents and politicians.
Georgia lawmakers have not given up. They have been meeting over the summer to consider other ways to rein in social media.
“I don’t think we can wait for the federal government to do this for us,” said Sen. Sally Harrell, D-Atlanta, who has been leading a study committee looking for another approach. “So, we’re going to do it.”
The industry has made itself a target for lawmakers across the political spectrum.
The state law that was sidelined in federal court was a top priority for Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, the Republican who leads the GOP-dominated Senate and, like Carr, is running for governor in next year’s GOP primary.
Jones and his allies picked Democrat Harrell to lead the bipartisan study committee on the impact of social media on children.
She and fellow senators recently heard from parents whose children had died by suicide after social media exposure.
Industry insiders such as Ravi Iyer, a technologist and academic psychologist at the University of Southern California, who led data science, research, and product teams at Facebook, have been educating Georgia lawmakers.
At a hearing this week, he described internal company documents that suggest platform designers knew their algorithms were harmful but deployed them anyway.
The documents, referenced in a lawsuit against Meta by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, describe how Meta undercounted harmful content and experiences reported on its platforms, including bullying and harassment.
Iyer did the math using the leaked statistics. “That is millions and millions of kids,” he said.
Pete Furlong, a researcher with the Center for Humane Technology, said in the hearing that numerous whistleblower complaints indicate Meta has “abundant” research showing its algorithmic feeds harm kids and adults but that the company is not taking clear steps to address it.
“They could make it better,” he said. “It’s their business incentives that drive them to design these products in this way.”
After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead in Utah last week, the state’s Republican governor said social media companies were addicting Americans to outrage and hate. Gov. Spencer Cox called technology companies “conflict entrepreneurs.”
It may be a cultural turning point that opens a window for successful legislation. But Georgia’s senators are wading into a legal thicket. Social media companies are sheltered by a foundational 1996 federal law that established the legal framework for the internet. Known as Section 230, the law immunizes platforms from liability for hosting users’ content.
Instead of choosing which content to promote like a typical publisher, internet platforms use algorithms to drive feeds that are tailored to each user to increase their engagement — and their value to advertisers.
The companies monitor users’ behavior on their platforms to inform the kind of custom results that frustrate critics such as Cox.
Lawmakers in California targeted this practice.
The Age-Appropriate Design Code Act regulates how platforms allow minors to use personalized recommendation algorithms.
NetChoice, the same industry group that sidelined Georgia’s law on First Amendment grounds, also filed a federal suit in California. A district judge ruled against the law, but the state appealed and earlier this month the federal appeals court there ruled partially in the state’s favor.
“It upheld the addictive feeds regulation,” said Matt Lawrence, a law professor at Emory University who is an expert on addiction law and has been following tech industry lawsuits.
It remains unclear to what extent courts elsewhere in the country will define algorithms as protected speech though.
Other states are targeting age verification. The U.S. Supreme Court recently upheld a law that does that in Texas.
The high court’s decision in June was about minors accessing websites with sexually explicit content rather than social media platforms.
Even so, Eric Segall, a federal courts and constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, said it suggests a shift in the court’s thinking.
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the nation’s top court has prioritized the First Amendment, Segall said.
But in recent years, parent rights have become a growing priority for conservatives, and the Texas decision may reflect that, he said. If there is a recalibration, it could create an opening for laws like Georgia’s that target social media.
“There’s a big movement out there for parents’ rights to control their children and that’s going to affect how judges view these laws,” Segall said. “As long as it’s a parent consent law, not a ban law, it’s much more likely to be upheld.”
But pendulums swing and the window for regulation could close. After all, the platforms have made themselves indispensable to people across the globe.
Last week, a government crackdown on social media in Nepal inspired deadly riots among the youth.
Any attempts to blunt the power of algorithms to make them less invasive will also dull their utility, said Noah Giansiracusa, a mathematician and author of the book “Robin Hood Math: Take Control of the Algorithms That Run Your Life.”
“We don’t want to make these powerful systems that help us worse,” he said. Like many who have watched the attempts to regulate social media unfold, he drew an analogy to the battles against the automobile industry for seatbelts, airbags and cleaner emissions.
Cars pollute and kill, he said, yet we need them.
“We want to make them better, but we don’t want to ban them,” he said. “So, that’s where we are with social media, except we don’t really know how to make them safer, and we have all these free speech issues.”
Lawrence, the Emory professor, said lawmakers will have to keep trying and see what sticks.
Harrell said she and her committee will focus on algorithm design and age verification. They are also turning to future tech.
An explosive report by Reuters in August said an internal Meta policy document permitted provocative chatbot behavior on topics including sex, race and celebrities.
Harrell’s committee will hear about artificial intelligence when it meets Oct. 8.
“Be prepared for an intense meeting,” Harrell said, “because what’s happening with AI is a little overwhelming.”
ATLANTA — The August workforce report for Georgia shows a gain of 1,900 jobs, with the unemployment rate unchanged from July.
Nearly five million are employed in the state, according to numbers released Thursday by the Georgia Department of Labor.
Health care and social assistance reached all-time highs, as did the leisure and hospitality sector. The biggest gainers for the month were retail trade, administrative and support services, accommodation and food services, and state government.
Decliners included construction, information, professional and technical services, real estate and rental and leasing, and federal government.
Georgia Labor Commissioner Bárbara Rivera Holmes pointed to growth during the first half of the year.
“With unemployment holding steady at 3.4% in August, nine-tenths below the national average, and Georgia adding workers seven months in a row, our workforce is strong and growing,” she said.
